Roads to the Ocean
by The Mad Poet
Summary: We are all going somewhere. Sometimes with a map, sometimes a compass, sometimes a guide. And sometimes led on only by a feeling. . .something cold, broken off inside. Post series, mindgames, Unfinished.


**DISCLAIMER: **I, The Mad Poet, do not own Yuugioh or related characters. I am poor and suing me is fucking retarded. However, I do own the following piece of fanfiction and all original concepts presented therein: steal and I will hunt you down and beat you with a crowbar. Don't think I won't.

Written as part of the object challenge for Fanfiction Alliance on DA while screwed up on no sleep and a bottle of painpills. Beware of mindfuck.

* * *

Roads to the Ocean

**1**

It was morning and, for all of that, the lampshade was probably a perfectly normal thing to awaken to. Dark eyes still hazed with the thin scrim of sleep and veiled by tangled strands of white hair blinked once, then again slowly at the thin bright light of dawn creeping through drawn blinds. From this vantage, one cheek against a pillow still strangely cool and smelling of unwashed hair and harsh detergent, the dark body of the lamp seemed monumental, eternal; some bleak unmarked obelisk of false wood, chipped at the base to let its plastic nature stare dumbly through. And the lampshade. Yellow and dingy, mottled with stains and the smudged ashy circles of cigarette burns. Someone had scrawled a cheery _good morning, fuckweed _on the far inner rim long ago in fading pen, and it grinned back at him with blurry lines. Good morning fuckweed, please visit our office for complimentary coffee and doughnuts, you stupid sorry excuse of a man. With a low groan which twisted itself into the hitching, dry wrack of a sob, the pale narrow figure in the strange hard bed curled in on itself, pulling the scratchy blanket up over his head.

Ryou Bakura, of course, had no such lamp.

Which meant that it had happened again. That it was _still happening_, dear God or gods or _someone_, anyone who could help him: oh please no, it was still happening.

In the dark confines of the blanket, he squeezed his eyes closed until stars exploded in the night behind his lids and counted to ten in deep, shaking breaths through his mouth. They tasted like the sour sweating heat he had slept in. They tasted like fear on his tongue, slick and thick and heavy. Telling himself it was only a dream--and it _could_ have been only a dream, it really could have; he had had such awful dreams before, or worse, but never better--he slowly lowered the blanket again. Slowly opened his eyes against the light turning ugly, blaring red through the filter of his lids and praying for his own dim room: his emptied shelves, his boxes even now still left packed in weary resignation of the next move, always just over the horizon; his chaotic, desperate brand of cleanliness and the desk, lonely against the wall and weighted with picture frames and letters left unsent. For lingering smells of pewter and copper and something heavier he dared not question, branded into the very reality of the apartment. He prayed for another nightmare, because the passage of years should have set him free.

The battered lamp stared back in apathy with its plastic dent of an eye, _good morning, fuckweed_ still oddly jaunty where it leered back beneath the shade. It seemed smug, and as Ryou rose slowly to sit in the bed he reached out with one trembling hand to push it from the endtable. It crashed loudly where it tumbled, smacking against the wall to leave a dark streak in the white paint, and he could imagine another eye there, almost blinking into life under the angled grin of the words when it struck the ground. The hand remained outstretched, trembling, for a moment as he stared at it; the nails broken jaggedly where he had not bitten them to the quick and caked with black, tips scratched and scabbing. He closed his eyes and folded it back in against his chest. He did not know what he expected to find there--no weight hung around his neck, these days. It was long gone, all long gone, and only the arc of deep round scars remained. As though some broken piece had lodged in his heart to rot, they ached.

Not that it mattered.

His fingers loosened from their nervous clutch at the fore of his baggy shirt--it was dirty but looking down proved it, thank god, to be only overworn and stained with smudges of grease or oil, spatters of nothing more ominous than dried and flaking grey-brown mud. His hair felt dirty, his skin heavy, his tongue still thick not only with fear but something he had eaten, which had left a foreign greasy staleness behind, slightly charred. Lifting up the blankets to peer beneath he could see that he had indeed fallen asleep fully clothed, and his jeans were both dirty and torn. He had worn his muddy sneakers into the bed. The dirt smelled sour, as though something had rotted in it, and all at once he was struck with the incredible and overwhelming need to vomit. He lurched from the narrow boxy bed, hands--oh god, oh god how they stank with that awful decay--clamped desperately over his mouth as he stumbled a few stuttering steps across the small room until his gut slammed into the hard line of the countertop and he hacked something black and red and soupy brown into the soapscummed ceramic of the sink. He hung above with hands braced on either side of him, breathing shallowly as he stared down at the clots and strings of tissue in the mess; gulping down the sickly-sweet stink of it just as dead as the odor clinging to his clothes and hands. A part of him wondered distractedly if, despite the lack of blood on his person, it had been alive when he swallowed it--whatever it was--and that was all it took to bring it on again. And again. The fourth time nothing more came out than a wheezing, jagged heave of wet air. By then it looked almost as though some sick mind had taken it upon themselves to reduce the stray animal population with a blender and poured it out into the cracked sink of this cheap motel room with the patchy curtains and staring lamp. Shuddering violently at the image, Ryou turned on the water and watched it strike the cooling bile, loosening and thinning it and trying so hard to coax it down the drain.

He couldn't. Couldn't keep watching it. He jerked his eyes away to roll across the tacky linoleum countertop, hoping for soap. Maybe in the bathroom, with the tiny cubicle of its shower--he would want that too. He was covered in that hideous grave-smelling muck and there was dripping ichor, now, caught in the stray bits of his hair, and he would want that too. He found a bottle of mouthwash instead, something generic and acidic in a flimsy white bottle, and fumbled the cap off. The sharp ugly taste of it was welcome in the wake of stale flesh and vomit left clinging to his tongue. Drink, rinse, repeat. The memory of the taste was still there when the bottle fell empty from his fingers to the plastic trashcan below. He wished, desperately, for a stick of gum or breathmint of some kind. It seemed a strange thing to wish for, and he giggled.

God. God help him. What was wrong with him?

At this point the question may have been academic, or getting there, and that dull thought was as horrible as the thin ugly laugh still wringing out of his throat as he moved his hands upward to the mirror, staring at the ghostly figure reflected back at him. The brown eyes sunken and nervous, haunted; the skin sallow and drawn beneath a coat of streaked dust and the fall of lusterless, strangely stark white hair. Greasy and dirty and vomitous. A thin stubble decorated the sunken cheeks, and he wondered how long he had been gone, this time. He was too thin these days, and he knew it well--too light and sick and brittle, until a hard wind could have snapped him apart to scatter like straw in its fury. He was not sleeping enough, not eating enough, not getting enough light. He was turning into a hollow shell with bagged blank pits for eyes, and that laugh. That awful laugh twisting up out of him god why couldn't he _stop_? The man in the mirror, like some horrible caricature of the living, looking as though it had clawed itself from its own grave, was grinning at him with that leering, unhinged atrocity of teeth and hard angles that chased his nightmares sometimes. But _he_ was not. Oh no. He balled one battered hand into a fist and slammed it against that twisted smile until the mirror trembled with an uneasy crackle of glass. But it only laughed harder. He jammed his knuckle into his mouth, bit down hard to make it stop until blood burst through that sour filth, but it only laughed harder. What was wrong with him? A lot. Oh yes, quite a lot.

_And you have to stop this now. _He stared starkly at the giggling, deriding beast in the glass; nodding at that chuckled admonition and feeling a trickle of blood slick down from his mouth. _You have to turn around and take a deep deep breath, little host. Because I'm not in there anymore, and you've only yourself to blame._

And how do you like that, little rabbit? Pretty? Treasure of mine? He didn't like it at all but he still turned away, and assured himself that it was not because he had been told but because it _had_ been on his mind, yes. He had wanted so badly to tear his eyes from the grey thing in the glass and only now been able to make himself; to free his eyes from the skeletal creature he was decaying into, and the memory of something more. He sucked in a long hard breath, gagged on the blood of his hand, and dropped it to wrap aimlessly in his dirty shirt. Eyes darting, they flicked about the tiny room--the walls, the thin carpet, the endtable. His jacket, that long black thing he could not remember accquiring so many years ago but could not bring himself to throw away, tossed over a chair set in front of a battered tv bolted against the wall. Just a cheap motel room, and the small square desk calendar propped up against the duct-taped black telephone bore the date of nearly five years back. He stared at it a moment, the bland tear-off sheets marked by meaningless scribble. The format was of a joke but the language seemed to be french, and that was a joke too, and he almost laughed again almost _cannot_ laugh again please _don't make me laugh again_ I want to go home. Another deep, hard breath. Breathe Ryou breathe, little rabbit, my pretty, I need you alive. Except that I'm gone now and you've only yourself to blame.

In and out. Just in and out, deep and slow. Beneath the endless aching in his chest, the horrible undying memory in his chest, he could feel his heart begin to slow from that frantic hopped-up tripbeat. He scrubbed at his face, staring at the foreign calender--in _french_ of all things, who needed a calender in _french_--and tried to slow the panicky

(_rabbit_)

train of his thoughts. He needed to know where he was. How he had gotten there. How long he had been gone. And what he had been doing, oh god oh horror, in the meantime; what he had done to bring that charred taste to his tounge and the stringy tissue from his gut and the sweet-sour rotten gravedirt all over him, ground into his pores. He needed to focus, and to do that he stared at the unknown french joke, which come to think of it was probably dirty--by merit of location if not language--so he really, really didn't want to know it anyway, and focused. Focused on that. Behind him the sink had clogged with his bile, the water still running, and now was beginning to overflow onto the countertop.

He knew where he was, but he did not know _where_ he was. He knew that it was a motel somewhere, and that it was cheap, and that it was probably set quite firmly if not _in_ the middle of Nowhere then only slightly off to the left of it. It would not be the first time he had awakened to find himself in such a place, as if whatever madness stole his conciousness away and drove his body laughing into the night believed itself atoned with the presence of a bed and shelter, however strange, and in a way that was true. It was better than coming to in a ditch somewhere, anyway. Or a hospital. _Or a dark crawling dungeon. Or a madman's basement. Or a card game, for the love of god, that's turned into some life-or-death clash of the titans. Or sprawled over a strange table, in strange clothes, with your heart feeling all ripped out through your mouth and the sweet sweet weight off your neck but with something left, something rotten, broke off inside. _It went on--oh, did it go on! Forever and ever, a black landscape of oblivion pocked with bony atolls of confusion. Yes, the motels were much better. But _where was it_?

So many questions, and not even that seemingly simple answer would come to him. But surely there must be something identifying in the room--most motels left their mark everywhere, with return numbers and addresses should something be stolen or simply sprout legs and flee. He licked his lips--dry, chapped, split with the scars of his own nervous chewing. His head hurt. It hurt like a hangover without the alchohol; like Mary heavy with sourceless agony instead of child. Athena pounding, pounding away in the skull of a small and frightened Zeus. And while you're at it host, my stupid bunny, why don't you choke one out for good old Egypt?

Stop it. He had to stop it and focus. Scrubbed his roughened face again, rubbed at the deep hollows of his eyes, and he moved tentatively away from the support of the counter where tainted water was beginning to drip and drain onto the hard carpet. He would have something in his jacket, surely; they would be there because he needed them, some kind of pills, something to dull the pain and help him _focus_. All he had to do was put one step in front of the other, remember to breathe. And calm. The hell. _Down_.

He reached the chair without incident, and heaved a long sigh of relief. Fingers still trembling fumbled the pockets into reach, dipped in. There was no comforting rattle of keys or change--he had not driven, and if he had taken a bus he had not brought fare to return. No wallet, bulky with identification and folded notes, so there had been no cab. It made him wonder how he had accquired the room until he decided he didn't want to know that, either. A magazine, bent backwards over itself, dogeared and worn and with sheaves of loose paper crammed between the pages, tumbled from one deep pocket and struck the floor by his feet as he turned them out. A lump of unformed pewter and the fine-bladed, long handled knife that would someday shape it, bound together haphazardly with a thick red rubber band. The small bony rattle of two dice

(_which do not lie_)

clattering across the floor together, one stopped by the heap of paper at his feet and the other bouncing to a halt at last somewhere under the bed. They would have landed on nine and nine, he was sure, because this was a critical fumble if there ever was one. His fingers wrapped around the cool curve of a bottle at last and he drew it out with a sigh of intense relief. It was orange plastic but unmarked, and the small reddish pills had surely not been accquired through a doctor for all that they probably should have been. They may not have even been painkillers but they usually were, and Ryou had learned better than to question some of the gifts his oblivion left him with. Would it matter if they were not, after all? There was no great desire for death in him, but would it matter if they were poison? He shook a pile out into his palm and stared at it for a moment, considering it carefully, before tossing the entire handful back with a shrug and swallowing hard. The smooth coated lumps were bitter and sharp as they struggled down his tight dry throat. They tasted of overdose and therapy, and he stood unmoving as he waited for their weight to settle in his stomach before continuing.

Now, one more time. There was a piece of paper, yellowing and wrinkled and faded, taped and re-taped to the side of the television. Much as he had expected there was a name--Sleep Rite, of course, like something out of a cheap highway horror story--and beneath that a list of rules and regulations. Beneath that a phone number. An address. He stared at it for a long moment before deciding that it was, in fact, not only outside of Domino but at least within shouting distance of Nowhere--it rang no dim bells in his mind, though he had come to know the surrounding areas of his thus far longest-term housing rather intimately. The oversized tag affixed to the end of his room key, sitting atop the appliance, was marked with a fat red seven. Where. Down to the room number, he knew where.

How. Flicking open the battered curtains, flinching slightly from the sudden blast of light into his face, Ryou blinked frantically as his eyes struggled to catch up to the luminance. The sky was grey and heavy in the distance, and it would probably rain later. His eyes dropped to the parking lot, even knowing he could not have driven, but it contained only dust and gravel and the gutted, rusting skeleton of an old model-t propped up on cinderblocks. It had been red once, bright red, and out in all that grey and faded brown it looked overwhelming and overwhelmingly alone. A small, rotting buoy of life or reason, fading away to nothing in that sea of oblivion; amid the steep broken stones of confusion jutting like teeth from the waves. It looked like an omen, to some deep superstitious animal in his mind, and he closed himself into the dark of the room again slowly.

Feeling himself kneel, mind numb to the action as he tried to process that second elusive question--he clung to it in a strange fear of the third and looming fourth, as if some part of him knew--Ryou began to pick up the scattered papers from his pocket, one at a time. It was possible, he supposed, entirely possible that all of this was really nothing. That all of that stress and sleeplessness and sitting up late alone in the dark of his room, writing letters he would never send to people who would never reply, was simply getting to him. It was possible that he had come out here, coherently and of his own free will, for some perfectly legitimate reason simply lost in the crush of unreasoning panic. Yes. Oh, how he wanted that to be. But when his eyes turned down to the stack of papers in his hand, crumpled and smudged and folded, scribbled with odd shapes and jagged sketches in the margins, the familiar handwriting was not his own. Instead of painstaking, neatly sedate rows of even black marks it seemed to bite across the pages like teeth; a crooked scratchy shorthand scrawl almost violent, accusatory against the white. Faced with it for years, tearing its way across countless bills or notes or assignments, he could not have imitated it if he had tried. Obscurely frightening, ugly and aggressive for all that it was only pen on paper, he would not have wanted to.

One sheet at a time, Ryou began to crumple the papers in his shaky hands and let them fall to the floor. They made soft sounds, a strange series of tics and pops, as they dropped lightly and began to slowly unfold again. He did not read them, he had no desire to _read_ them and in fact the thought of what they might say in that cruel and deliberately illegible script settled a thick, greasy weight deep in his stomach. It had never been pleasant before, after all.

_You have to stop this now. _He nodded slowly, head heavy and hair falling in straggling, stiffening tangles before his face. _You have to stop this now, because I'm not in there anymore, little host. And do you know what that means?_

It meant that he was going crazy, probably, or even Crazy. The big crack. Especially because he was hearing snide, affectionately hateful voices in his head years after the problem should have been solved, but left its little pieces broken off inside to rot. Sane people could wander off and forget that they had done so; sane people could wake up in cheap motels with pounding headaches and not remember the night before. But once the voices came back--or one voice, no matter what, no matter who else had intruded it had only ever really been that one voice--you were well on the road to Crazy, if not already there. Once the voice came back, and you started writing things that you did not write; that _you _did not write and could hardly read in that strange, crooked script. He wondered if Crazy and Nowhere were sister-cities, and thought that they might be. But if he was going Crazy, he was not quite there yet. Maybe not Crazy but crazy, because if he heard the voice at least he did not answer any more. He only nodded again, and continued to crumple the sheets of paper one by one, slowly, in one hand. There were a lot of them.

_It means you've only yourself to blame._

Ryou's lip trembled faintly, the lines of his throat shuddering with the desire, the need to beg for silence. But he was not Crazy. Not yet. If he still heard the voice he would claim at least that cold bitter consolance, that he did not answer any more. He found himself turning the cool glossy pages of the fallen magazine in his hands, contours jagged with folds and soft with frayed edges beneath his healing fingers. The words flashed by black and white as he slipped the bend out of it, unfolding the paper with its own strange sigils and images of awe and horror to close it and twist it into a tight cylinder. A stylized eye--always an eye, such awful staring things--gaped unblinking from the cover, blind and half-covered by the riffled pages. It was not a familiar eye but it made him think of those that were, no less cryptic or mystic, and somehow more real for all that they had not been. Which made no sense, perhaps, except here in this place to the left of Nowhere, and well on its way to raving mad. He found himself tracing the lines of the image, the flowing script about it with the magazine unfolding in his hands again. It proclaimed some myriad occult secrets, the mysteries of life, the defeat of death. It was the kind of thing he would have shied from, these days, knowing how horrible a price such glories exacted, but the name on the subscription sticker was his. The address was a post box he did not remember having.

The water was beginning to splash thickly onto the carpet beneath the clotted sink, and a shower suddenly felt so much less imperative than getting far far away from here. Than getting home. The magazine fluttered to the floor again like some voiceless and many-winged bird of the dark, spreading its dark sheaves and leaving, perhaps, that once-bared image to stare with its own borrowed eyes and patchwork face into the deep mystic workings of the floor. He would let it gladly. He did not want to know why its wretched article had been selected, isolated, circled and highlighted and exalted. Without thinking about it he rolled his hand across the ground, and when it returned to him it cupped the lonely die--which had of course fallen on nine, what else would it fall upon--and that shapeless, lifeless lump of soft metal. The plastic cap of the knife seemed to beg bluntly against his skin where it pressed. The sensation brought a surge of naseua through his body, wracking and awful, and he quickly reached up to cram the items back into his jacket pocket. He stayed that way for a moment--fingers curled around the deep pocket, body twisted up off the knees, faced pressed into the dark heavy fabric stale with mercifully anonymous stains. It smelled of damp places, dark places; smoke and the memory of copper. It stank of chipped pewter and stale air and something heavy, something thick and real he dared not question. It smelled of snakes, faintly, musty and dry. It smelled not of him or his comforts so much as shadows and deep screaming horrors, and he shuddered with a soft cry hitching painfully in the base of his throat. It smelled strangely, sadistically of home.

_The question, little host, is how will you get there_?

There was a phone in the room. He could call for help.

_The question, little host, is who will you turn to?_

He had friends. Yes. Yes he did, he was sure--he had friends, good friends. Close friends. If he needed them, they would be there for him he was sure of it. This was a basic tenet of friendship, one so simple it almost shied away from his grasp. He held on to it with desperate tenacity, almost hoarded it against himself as he pulled himself with trembling arms onto shaky feet. The calender

(_in French, of all things_)

was knocked aside onto its face as he snatched the silver-taped phone long since fading into grey. He had friends and friends helped each other, of course they did, it was part of some deep and inexplicable but wholly implicit trust associated to the word, the truth, the very _concept_, and he told himself this even as he froze with the receiver against his ear, the hollow monotony of a dialtone rattling the fetid pounding in his skull.

_The question, little host,_

He closed his eyes, that weak fluttering cry breaking free and escaping in the thin, hitching sob of a moan. "Oh go away. Just please. . .just _please go away_. . ."

_is do you really?_

It did not go away, of course. It did not go away because there was something rotten, left behind; something rotten left broken off inside. It did not go away because the problem had been solved long ago, years ago, and time should have set him free. It did not go away because it was not there any more, little bunny, and he had only himself to blame. And now he was answering back again.

Which meant the question

_(little host)_

was really whether or not anyone coming to his rescue would be safe.

As if his response had infused the horrible perversion of his own mild voice with a new and horrible vitality, it seemed to hiss against his ear with a breathy explosion of giggles. _Yes, my fool. That _is_ the question, that old hack Shakespear be damned. That _is_ the question, now that we're all done lying to ourselves, and the answer is that even though I'm gone I've taught my host a pretty lesson in taking care of things, haven't I? I've taught my host a lot more pretty lessons than I thought. Would we like to see how many?_

Shivering, uncertain, Ryou felt his shoulders ball up and his head go down, a gesture of defense and submission. His fingers drummed nervously across the keypad of phone, rattling loose numbers gummy with the grit and oil of a hundred thousand fingers before them. He did not want to answer that awful whisper, which had always sounded like him but never sounded, thank God, quite just _like him_. It was now less out of a desire to not feel Crazy--because it was too late for that now, he was starting to believe--and more out a desperate, childish need not to urge it on. There was something familiar to the sensation, easily likened to denying the

(_monster monster monster in the dark_)

strange creeping shadows of youth by clinging to something so primitive as a weak bulb of light in the corner or the Voice of a Parent. When he was small he had thought of it that way, with the capitals, as some almighty mystic talisman against the unknown to be bowed before and worshipped and have strange childish rites performed in the name of; a fickle pagan figure which might on any night decide to turn away. As an adolescent living alone he had found that idea silly.

_But not anymore, eh host? _

No. Not anymore.

The ancient tape was flaking and peeling in his sweatslicked palm, oddly cold, and the grimy grey tape-dust of its ages caked in the dirty lines with whatever sour filth had also clung there. The dialtone had given way to the intrusive and somehow offended blat which phones accqired left too long off the hook. It occured to him that he was standing there, braced against the table as not to fall, and staring with unfocused eyes at the mirror now cracked and smudged across the small room. His reflection did not seem to tremble; it did not seem to lean weakly against the support of the crowded endtable with a jaw slightly slack and a piece of battered black plastic screaming tonal obscenities into his ear. In his eyes--and perhaps this marked him as _really_ Crazy, perhaps this doomed him because everyone knew didn't they that mirrors showed not the truth but what was set before them--the body in the mirror too dead and damned to be a man leaned forward on that same table, shoulders huddled not in submission but the tense animal roll of a prowl. In his eyes in the mirror across the room, which could have shown only what it was given to show to him, Ryou saw the ghost of himself grin with a wall of teeth too sharp, mouth marked by a trace of red at one corner and the faintest green-brown slime of bile at the other. It was casual and tense and horrible, coiled and malevolent as some twisted god of charnel serpents. Hungry, vicious serpents so old they had grown minds and the minds had grown rotten there among the dust of the dead, rotten until the flat heads with the flat eyes and the teeth, not flat but awful, were all full of that swampy toxin.

_Call them asps, host. Whever you go, people call them asps. But I suppose you must know that, all things considered._

Go away. He wanted to tell it to go away, knowing it would only tell him it was already gone. A mad flash of a movie came to him, a priest standing above a girl tied to a bed and writhing, screaming obscenities. It was not the sort of movie _he_ would watch but he had, he supposed, some time down in the darks of oblivion. There would be no exorcism here, of course. No. But he could not help but wonder if he would twist so if there were.

Which was not the question. He had to focus. Focus before he went not Crazy but completely Off The Deep End, to that place where the monsters did not stay locked up in their mirrors or the pieces, broken off, which rotted inside.

_If the object is to fool yourself you need to try harder. We know, don't we? _

"Be quiet." He sounded small, begging in his own ears, and when Ryou placed his hand on the cradle of the phone to silence that enraged howl he left it there. Trying to find silence. Trying to find peace. Trying to find something, anything, a solution or a focus or miracle from God would have been nice but anything would have made him just as happy. He felt that he had tumbled down the rabbit hole, and if he did not find an exit soon he would be trapped forever, maybe in this same dingy room forever. "Please, can't you just be quiet? Can't you leave me alone?"

He watched the thing in the mirror shake its head even as he did his own, but while his was the slow disbelieving horror of denial the shambling dead still grinned atop its version of the gesture. It was the no of negation, of absolutes, the way zero must look when it swallowed the sky. _No can do, lovely. Because I'm not in there any more, and you've only yourself to blame._

Which he did, of course. Because he was told or because it was true, he did. In the end they may have been the same because that voice, his voice but never quite _his_ voice, had never really lied to him. Like the dice, it did not lie.

And speaking of that vice--that ugly word three letters not four but surely an obscenity still--speaking of that, assuming he could find someone to call what would he say to them? He wracked his mind for a number and when he found it, yes, he could just imagine--'oh please Yuugi, it's Bakura and I know we haven't talked in a year but I'm so lost and alone out here, and oh please Yuugi I don't know where it is except that it's somewhere between the Sovereign State of Reality and the People's Republic of Stark Raving Mad and you can see Nowhere, out the window, and oh god oh please could you drive around in it all with a vague address until you find me before I claw myself apart?' Oh, yes. Surely that would sound lovely. It made him giggle, a high and jaggedly desperate sound, and he bit his tongue again to silence it. He still heard it in his ears.

_You don't want to call him anyway, do you. Yes. Even you can do better than that. You just don't want to talk to _him.

Ryou thought that it wasn't fair, that the thing in the mirror--which may or may not have been gone, all this time; which may or may not have been only himself to blame--should be able to do this to him. To pull out the deep thoughts, the dark thoughts, the ugly black spots all crusted with the sour soil he had buried them in; so sweet and heavy, all rotten broken off inside. Beacause he could have called Yuugi, of course, because he still knew the number. Because they were, he supposed, still rather as good a pair of friends as their circumstances would have allowed them, and he _did_ like the other boy--or man now, they had been young men for a few years now he guessed, if not by merit of experience then time at last--with his guileless smile and unswerving faith and vast affections. He liked Yuugi very much, and always had, and really was positive that he always would consider him his very nearest and dearest companion; the most trusted hand held out to him.

_But._

But. But they would leave it at 'but', the boy and the beast, because Ryou turned his eyes away from their drift back to the mirror again. He dropped the thought back into its shallow grave and pressed the dirt in hard, and a part of him wondered if it would rise again like all the other rotten pieces. If this was where the sour smell, the drying filth on his hands and clothes had come from. That thought at least he could not banish, even as his fingers began to tremble again and they tripped over the numbers of the phone, dialing slowly and carefully.

There was silence, and he could feel the mirror watching him with that patient, hateful twist of grin; look at my pet, so sweet and stupid. _So you run to the next worst thing. Do you think this one will tell you it's alright? Do you think anyone can chase me away now, when I'm gone, and you've only yourself to blame? What will you tell _this_ poor fool, if not the truth?_

I will tell him what I have always told him. I will tell him the truth, the real truth, _my_ truth, and that's what I've always told him. He knows you and he knows me, and if he doesn't understand then. . .then. . .

"Hello?"

Ryou stared at the calender, eyes unfocused, jaw working in silence for a moment. He wanted to hang up. To slam the phone down. Because the chance was not worth taking. His voice, when it came, was tiny and timid; the sound of a child performing those sacred rites, strange and obscure to please the sacred Voice of a Parent into one more night, oh great pagan guardian, of protection from the dark. "It's. . .it's Bakura. I'm. . .lost. And alone. And. . .and oh god I'm scared. . ." Behind him the water ran, and the creature in the glass did not laugh. It only grinned at him, wild and stretching and hungry, full of disgust and sardony until the scars of the lips pulled free and bled thin trails of drug-thinned red down the dirty unshaven chin. He felt himself running his tongue over his own broken lips as he continued the pleading rites, the tight curve of broken skin, and wondered what the wet taste of copper like a living wire meant in a small voice hushed out by the cry of fear and denial. Blood. It did not mean blood, because _he_ was not grinning like that, no, and so when the phone tumbled from his numb hands to strike the desk with a sharp report and await in silence that ugly offended yowl of disconnection he did not raise them to wipe it away. He simply slipped the long dark coat about his shoulders, smelling of snakes and secrets, and tucked the outsized seven keyring into his palm. There was nothing else he needed. Everything else could stay.

His chest ached, and he had a ride to wait for.


End file.
